Toshiba, Cisco team up to build a smart community

Toshiba Corporation and Cisco will collaborate on new ways to utilise the Internet of Everything (IoE) that can dramatically improve processes, productivity and experiences in manufacturing, transportation and city environments.

Representatives from Toshiba and Cisco signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the intention to advance the progress of a new Smart Community.

The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) market has accelerated dramatically in the past year throughout a wide range of industries and public sector organisations. The IoE connects people, processes, data and things through the Internet, turning data generated from connected devices into actionable intelligence that can improve processes, decision-making and scenario planning for businesses and people. The IoE also is creating a greater need for fog computing, which stores and processes data at physical locations closer to devices and operations—or the edge—instead of handling all processes in the cloud.

"Our relationship with Toshiba is expected to strengthen the technology foundation for the Internet of Everything, ensuring fast, reliable and valuable outcomes for our mutual customers in both the public and private sectors," said Wim Elfrink, Cisco EVP of industry solutions and chief globalisation officer.

This global collaboration brings together the Cisco Fog Computing network environment featuring the company's network-wide security solution with the Toshiba Group's end-point management technology. The joint effort will help monitor and maintain multiple devices, stream computing technology for high-speed information processing collected from devices and provide storage technology to accumulate information generated with M2M technology. Through this process, the two firms will explore the feasibility of technological verification, marketing activities and the provision of solutions for promoting widespread use of fog computing.

"The importance of fog computing is expected to increase for managing many devices in the cloud." said Hironobu Nishikori, Corporate Senior Vice President and President and CEO of Cloud & Solutions Company, Toshiba Corporation. "We believe a synergistic convergence of Toshiba's advanced device management technologies and Cisco's rich expertise in networking will open up ways to provide outstanding excellence in the ever-growing field of the M2M/IoT."

Toshiba seeks to generate new value by connecting its energy, health care, storage products and services using cloud computing, big data and analytics technologies to achieve its vision of creating a safe, secure and comfortable society, the "Human Smart Community." Toshiba will apply the technologies with the IoT, M2M and fog computing to a wider range of devices and spread it to manufacturing systems, traffic/transportation systems, and smart cities.

To allow customers to make maximum use of the opportunities for value generated by the IoT and IoE, Cisco believes that a new approach to infrastructure optimised for many distributed sensors and data processing is critical. Cisco is also encouraging fog computing architecture, in which new networking, computing and storage for value generation in the IoT era are deployed from the cloud to the edge. To expand the market for this technology, Cisco will promote innovation with its strategic ecosystem partners.